Thoreau’s Sounds

A lecture by Ivan Gaskell (Bard Graduate Center)

Through the natural history specimens and Native American artifacts he collected, Henry David Thoreau sought connections with the worlds he inhabited. Appealing to these collections, Ivan Gaskell’s new book—Mindprints: Thoreau’s Material Worlds (University of Chicago Press)—examines Thoreau’s ideas about human migration, shelter, the fine and useful arts, and the role of sound in human experience. For Thoreau, mindprints are physical traces of making that imprint the maker’s mind on items such as Native American arrowheads, thereby rendering that mind intuitively accessible. In this talk, which marks the publication of Mindprints, Gaskell explores how Thoreau articulated his place within his worlds through an aesthetic understanding of the environment and everyday life.

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Ivan Gaskell is professor of cultural history and museum studies at Bard Graduate Center. Appealing to a wide range of societies geographically and historically, his research centers on three fields in philosophy: how humans make and use material items; questions arising from writing history from material items; and the role of museums in the generation of knowledge claims. Recent books are Paintings and the Past: Philosophy, History, Art (2019) and (as editor with Sarah Anne Carter) The Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture (2020).